In general, a portable terminal is a device, commonly called mobile communication terminal such as digital phone, cellular phone, PCS phone, a portable digital terminal such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), or a small-sized notebook computer. Typically, it is connected with a wireless communication link to provide various digital content such as audio and image information to a user.
Such a portable terminal has been improved with the aim of high sensitivity and size/weight reduction for maximizing its portability as a key function, and this trend may be found when we see how a mobile communication terminal, representative of a portable terminal, has been developed.
In other words, bar-type or flip-type terminals among early mobile communication terminals are rarely used in recent years because of the difficulty in expanding a display unit of the terminal, as well as the terminal's big size and heavy weight. Recently, however, sliding folder-type or folder-type terminals have been widely used due to their small size and light weight as well as the expansion capability of the display unit in such terminals.
On the other hand, wireless data services are popularized in recent years, and it is a general tendency that the multimedia content providing function of a portable terminal becomes more important than any other classical functions provided by this portable terminal, such as the speech function in the case of a mobile communication terminal and the data input function in the case of PDAs. In order to achieve the multimedia content providing function and, in particular, the effective image content providing function through a portable terminal, an important factor is how well image content that has been received from a communication network is displayed through the display unit of the terminal.
As explained above, however, the size of display panel should be restricted in order to enhance the portability of the terminal. As a result, there is difficulty in displaying high quality video content on conventional display panels or units in portable terminals.